Originally posted by TheDS:
All I'm saying is, in this game, one must decide for oneself what one wants. If you think 10,000 tons does not a cruiser make, then you're going to decide whatever you want. I, on the other hand, will decide on standards I like, and because they are standards, I will stick to them. This does not invalidate YOUR designs for YOUR standards, but when you and I compare ship designs, if your design meets certain criteria I have set forth as being something, I will label it such. I imagine you will do the same to my designs, assuming you make a standard.
The way I define ship classes depends greatly on what people think of when the term is evoked. "Destroyer" evokes an image of a small, fast ship without a lot of firepower. "Battleship" evokes images of large, well armored, heavily armed, pondering craft. "Cruiser" is somewhere in the middle. Now if we go and use qualifiers, like "missile" and "colonial" and stuff like that, well, we have to define what that means a little more. "Colonial" might not evoke the same image in your mind as it does mine. Our definitions also depend on how the rules interpret our designs. 4 G might be fast in one system, and painfully slow in another, and unimaginably fast in a third.
The term "spinal mount" implies that there can be only one. The spine of a spaceship is its major structural member, like the keel is the major structural member of a wet ship. It bears all the weight, and defines an axis of balance.
Any further mounts cannot be spinal. They CAN be parallel. The book says they can be up to 80% of the ship's length, but clever people such as you and I can always find ways to break such simplistic rules. A sphere can have lots of parallel mounts mounted in all directions. The usefulness of such designs will depend on the level of detail possible in the combat rules used. Most would find them useless, but others would find them indispensible.
Of course, there is an exception to the "only 1" spinal mount, and that is the "Janus" mount, which has two spinal mounts butted up against each other, one firing straight ahead and one firing straight back.
So as I said before, being a Sci-fi games means we have to (or get to) define WHAT exactly a cruiser is, and we can make it a standard. And since the common frame of reference is the Imperial Human in this game, well, I'll let YOU decide if that means Vilani or Solomani or something else entirely. Stragnely, though, when I look around, I've never seen any humans besides Solomani... We have to start somewhere, even if it seems a little egocentric.
If anyone doesn't like that, then I suggest s/he come up with your own systems of measurement. KM, second, KL, Kelvin, Degree of angle, AU, Year, KG, Hertz, Watt, base-10 numbers,.... All those are humanocentric. If you want to be REALLY standard, base stuff on the frequency of hydrogen, the speed of light, binary, pi, and anything else that clearly is universal.